In the nascent days of the internet in the 1990s, when broadband was but a futuristic dream for most, a company named Quokka Sports emerged with a bold vision: to redefine how sports fans consumed live events. Its journey, marked by ambitious partnerships, pioneering rights deals, technological innovation, and ultimately, the harsh realities of the dot-com bust, serves as a compelling story about the challenges and triumphs of early digital media, or as it was called back then, ‘new media’.
Twenty-five years after Quokka’s award-winning partnership with US broadcaster NBC for online coverage of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, SportBusiness Tech is revisiting the company’s story through a two-part case study. In part one, we examine Quokka’s ambitious journey as a digital company very much ahead of its time, and in part two, we find out what challenges it faced, what happened when things didn’t go according to plan, and which legacies have endured.
Before co-founding Quokka Sports in 1996 and becoming its president and CEO, Al Ramadan was a keen athlete, enjoying playing cricket and baseball in his home country of Australia before taking up sailing at the age of 20. One of the country’s leading sailors (and future Quokka co-founder), John Bertrand, came across Ramadan working at UNIX Systems Technologies and asked him to run the technology campaign for the 1995 Americas Cup.
The offer was a no-brainer for Ramadan who was able to merge his passion for sailing with his work in tech. During the event, he was based on a boat following competitors during testing and racing. “We streamed data from the race boat to the tender — the Lady Sharon — and using high performance workstations, provided data overlays on large computer screens for the coaches and scientists to understand performance,” recalls Ramadan.
“Special guests were sometimes allowed on board the tender to watch the races close up. Pretty much every time, the guests were more interested in what was happening on the computer screen than looking out the window at the boats racing.”
Ramadan and Bertrand quickly realised that data was more important than mere video for sailing (and likely many other sports). It was this insight that ultimately led to the creation of Quokka Sports and a subsequent inaugural ground-breaking partnership with the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race.
“When the event went live on 21 September, 1997 in Southampton, England, we had so many online users from around the world that we browned-out the internet south of Market Street,” recounts Ramadan. “Literally the whole network went down.”
The event showcased Quokka’s unique approach, offering fans an unprecedented level of detail and interaction. Rather than simply broadcasting the sailing race, Quokka provided real-time multimedia content that allowed viewers to track boats, understand strategies, and feel intimately connected to the competition. This immersive experience was a stark contrast to the passive consumption offered by conventional media at the time, establishing Quokka as a visionary in the burgeoning field of digital sports.
“Over the course of the nine-month event we came to understand that our race viewer was the most popular aspect of our coverage — a map with the positions of the boats combined with data and media from the race boats. Our virtual race was also very popular. It demonstrated that data was indeed as valuable as video, and investors jumped in.”
Collaborations with Championship Autoracing Team (CART) and the International Motorcycling Federation (FIM) followed, with Quokka recognising the allure of popular motorsports that were not being given much television coverage.
Quokka did the same with adventure sports, providing immersive coverage of the Marathon des Sables and other expeditions and challenges, often creating unique and compelling content aimed at serving fans not able to follow their sports in a linear way.
Alongside its 1999 NASDAQ stock exchange listing, Quokka’s ambition quickly expanded to larger, more global events.
“What we came to understand was that the owner of the broadcast rights had a critical role for many of the large sporting events,” says Ramadan.
“Internet rights, the right to broadcast online live from an event, was a hot topic and we spent a lot of our time creating the frameworks and agreements for these new media rights. Often, the broadcasters were on the other side of the table arguing that they owned the rights to moving images. It was a challenging time for sports governing bodies, broadcasters, sponsors and start-ups who wanted to create a different kind of sports experience.”
By working with and understanding the ambitions of sports rights holders, and acquiring new media rights for itself, Quokka envisioned a branded sports entertainment network comprising several sport verticals that would cover premier sporting properties.
Its proprietary technology and publishing platform were designed to handle a wide range of digital assets, including video, text, audio, images, athlete biometrics, telemetry, environmental data, e-mail, results and timing.
This rich content was intended for distribution across the internet, broadband, and emerging digital media networks, aiming to engage a global community of sports enthusiasts by giving them control over the action sequence and allowing them to experience and view sports from a variety of perspectives.
Quokka’s most high-profile endeavour came through a significant partnership with NBC in 2000.
Ramadan takes up the story: “NBC held the rights to the Olympics in the USA and the International Olympic Committee asked us to work with NBC to deliver the first digital coverage of an Olympics Games.”
This collaboration culminated in the creation of the NBCOlympics.com website for the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics. Quokka’s content aimed to complement NBC’s exclusive television coverage by offering an unparalleled online experience, using its proprietary technology to combine live scoring, athlete bios, video highlights and simulations. The website was a massive undertaking at that time, featuring 20,000 pages of text and 27,000 images.
The partnership gave Quokka 51 per cent of the website’s revenues and oversight of virtually all content, with NBC primarily contributing television promotion. Quokka invested heavily, spending between $20m and $30m on the Sydney Olympics website alone, hoping to recoup costs through advertising sales and online shopping.
The collaboration proved immensely successful, with NBCOlympics.com winning a gold award from Nielsen for its coverage. It was a landmark moment for Quokka and the sports industry at large, showing that a new media company could not only coexist with a traditional broadcaster (despite ubiquitous fears at the time that the technology would cannibalise television audiences and threaten rights revenues), but also enhance its offerings in a meaningful way.
Quokka executives saw this as just the beginning, with plans to produce websites and a plethora of the most sticky of content for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and the 2004 Summer Games in Athens.
Meanwhile, employee numbers swelled to 280, with the company expanding from its headquarters in San Francisco, to offices in New York, London and Troy, Michigan.
The company’s Olympics success, however, was a bright light before the storm. The signs of the coming dot-com crash were already on the horizon, but few could predict the devastation that was about to unfold for Quokka Sports.
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